Stem cells, which are capable of self-renewing and differentiating into various types of cells, have captured great interest as a valuable resource for regenerative medicine and developmental biology research. Technical progress during the last decade has enabled the isolation of stem cells from a wide range of tissues, their differentiation into specific types of cells, and the generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (“iPSC”) from somatic cells. The recent success of patient-specific iPSC generation (Park et al., “Disease-specific Induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) Cells,” Cell, 134(5):877-886 (2008)) and its differentiation into functional cells (Dimos et al., “Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Generated from Patients with ALS Can Be Differentiated into Motor Neurons,” Science, 321:1218-1221 (2008)) exemplifies how stem cells can be used for drug discovery and treatment of specific individual patients with complex diseases (Dimos et al., “Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Generated from Patients with ALS Can Be Differentiated into Motor Neurons,” Science, 321:1218-1221 (2008)).
However, despite the general enthusiasm for the multiple applications of stem cells, their practical use both in research and disease therapy has been hampered by the heterogeneity of stem cells and their unpredictable proliferation and differentiation (Amariglio et al., “Donor-Derived Brain Tumor Following Neural Stem Cell Transplantation in an Ataxia Telangiectasia Patient,” PLoS Med., 6(2): e1000029 (2009)). The current methods of isolation and characterization of stem cells mostly depend on morphology in culture such as colony or sphere formation and marker protein expression that can be detected by immunostaining. These methods, however, require a long time and antibody reactions which may make the cells unsuitable for further usage. Therefore, the development of tools and technologies that may facilitate the isolation, identification, and characterization of stem cells is one of the most demanding requisites in the field of stem cell research and applications.
The present invention is directed to overcoming these and other deficiencies in the art.